


A Singular Love, Which Is Far From Common

by Anise



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Complete, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-05 06:47:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17913845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anise/pseuds/Anise
Summary: An amusement park based on the Tudor dynasty sounded like a good idea when George and Luna first proposed it to Ginny. But nobody counted on insufficient codpieces, Styrofoam beheadings, random roller coasters, and above all,  Draco Malfoy…





	1. Chapter 1

+++

Ginny lay in bed and watched the morning sunlight stream in through the small, lead-paned window, lighting up Draco Malfoy’s hair. He was still asleep, softly breathing, his chest rising and falling with each breath. She had never told him how much she loved looking at his hair in the sunlight. In her opinion, his ego was more than healthy enough as it was. But it always seemed to glow with silver and pale gold. Sometimes, she liked to run her hands through it too, but that always woke him up. 

She sat up and looked down at his sleeping face, knowing that she really should wake him. They hadn’t met here to make love, for once; they’d only had a snatched hour or so. She was visiting Luna at the old Lovegood house in Kent, helping her to straighten everything out after her father moved to a small flat in London, and one of the Malfoy houses was located close by. She and Draco met in a small cottage on the back side of the grounds of the old Hever Castle, a gatekeeper’s or hunter’s lodge really, snug with white-plastered walls and exposed dark wooden beams. 

Draco had said in low seductive tones that an hour wasn’t even enough time to get properly started. So even though she would have settled for less, she lay in his arms and talked a bit, and then he slept. She couldn’t even close her eyes. Every time she tried, she started worrying and worrying, and she couldn’t stop. 

She reached out and fingered a strand of glowing pale gold, unable to resist. 

His eyes opened, and his hand reached up to entwine with hers, pulling their linked fingers through his hair and down onto his chest, where he let them both rest. 

“You really should get up,” she said. 

“Yes, I ought to.” He didn’t make a move. 

“Then why don’t you?”

One side of his mouth quirked up in a smile. “Because lying in bed with you is very nice, Ginny.”

_Nice._ It was a sweet word, a soft word, one that she had never thought would be associated with him. It almost felt dangerous for that very reason. _Nice_ and Draco Malfoy just couldn’t go together, or at least, that was what she had always believed. 

 

She had thought that their brief, frantic affair during the winter and spring after she graduated Hogwarts was a singularity of several months that could never be repeated, no more. She had resigned herself that it would be limited to sex, no matter how glorious that sex might be. She had never been quite sure who was responsible for ending it; sometimes she put all the blame on him, and then again, generally in the darkest part of the night while staring up at a ceiling, she knew that she bore much of the responsibility herself. They had been apart for half a year that had seemed more like an eternity, as far as she was concerned. Then, when they had started their relationship again six months before, their every meeting seemed made up of stolen moments, each of which might be the last. Ginny could never shake the fear that what they had now was some kind of pause in a headlong rush, a bubble of air in a welling ocean that would soon break in, smother, and overwhelm them. It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. 

“I wonder if Anne Boleyn ever really did sleep here,” she said, because it was something to say. 

Draco shrugged. “It was her family’s house. I suppose she might have done.”

“Have you ever seen her ghost at the main house?”

“No.” Draco grinned down at her, that grin of hers that she loved to see, so unlike the rather cruel smirk that was all she had ever seen of him during their shared years of Hogwarts. A real smile counterbalanced his thin mouth, bringing the lower half of his face into line with his huge eyes and high cheekbones. He leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose. “I believe she was reincarnated as someone rather feisty.”

“Really?”

“Really. A direct, if distant, descendant. A certain redhead I know, for instance.”

She gave him a very half-hearted shove. “You’d really do need to get up, Draco. You can’t be late for this.”

“All right. My mistress and friend, my heart and I surrender ourselves into your hands.”

She sat bolt upright. “Draco, we’ve been over this before; I _won’t_ be a—“

“Hush. Henry VIII’s fourth love letter to Anne, remember?”

“Oh.” She did remember. They had read those love letters out loud to each other before, and Ginny had enjoyed the passionate language. As long as she was able to forget that the writer had ended up beheading the reader, it was all very romantic. 

She watched Draco smoothing his trousers, straightening his robe, knotting his tie. He looked at himself in the mirror, seeming to examine his face for flaws in its perfect surface. 

In moment like this, she thought that he did look like a bit like the young Henry VIII. The Blacks had roots in the Tudor line; they were direct descendants of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley’s secret child. (0) She had seen oil portraits that Muggles had never found. There was one Holbein painting done a couple of years after Henry’s coronation, when he was no older than Draco was now. He had probably been a little like Draco, she thought. A spoiled young man, indulged, much in him that was generous and good-natured, but with a hint of the darkness that Draco had in him, too, a hint of the tyrant that Henry would later become. And breathtakingly handsome, with a strong slender body and abundant fair hair and an exquisitely chiseled face. It was a portrait from Henry’s best days, one that had survived only in the wizarding world. 

Ginny switched back to the present. She wanted to ask Draco again if he really would meet her at four o’clock, after it was over, if this Wizengamot meeting really would be the short tying up of loose legal ends that he had so often assured her it would be. But Ginny would rather be chased by rabid nundus than sound like a needy, clingy woman; the gods knew that Draco had enough of _those_ in the past. 

He turned back to the bed and leaned over her, as if he had heard her speak the words.

“This won’t take more than a few hours, Ginny. ‘By absence your affeftion to us may not be lessened, for it were a great pity to increase our pain, of which absence produces enough and more than I could ever have thought could be felt.’”

“’Reminding us of a point in astronomy which is this’”, said Ginny, picking up the text of Henry’s letter. “’The longer the days are, the more distant is the sun, and nevertheless the hotter; so is it with our love, for by absence we are kept a distance from one another, and yet it retains its fervour, at least on my side. I hope the like on yours.’”

He reached down and caressed her shoulder with one hand. “’Assuring you that on my part the pain of absence is already too great for me; and when I think of the increase of that which I am forced to suffer, it would be almost intolerable, but for the firm hope I have of your unchangeable affection for me. And to remind you of this sometimes, and seeing that I cannot be personally present with you, I now send you the nearest thing I can to that, namely,  
my picture set in a bracelet.” 

Draco’s hand moved down her arm and her wrist, stopping at the bracelet he had given her months ago, after the furious night when they had met, fought, and parted, and then found each other again, and had come to this cottage on the grounds of Hever Castle for the first time. It was a delicate web of citrines set in white gold. At least she hoped they were really citrines. They looked suspiciously like canary yellow diamonds to her, and she really should have refused to accept them, if so. But she had let that point go after a few dizzying kisses on the most sensitive bit of her inner arm, and Draco’s explanation that they were chosen to match her eyes. There was a tiny locket set into the bottom, and it did hold his picture. She’d scoffed at him for selfishness and vanity in giving his own portrait as part of her gift, and then she had looked at it ten times a day whenever they were apart. 

“Remember. Four o’clock, at the _Will o’the Wisp_.” He kissed her on the mouth, hard. Ginny shuddered. She had never lost her desperate hunger for this man. She was afraid of her own reactions to him, sometimes. Most of the time, if the truth be known. 

“Will it really work out?” she asked, after they both came up for air. 

“I don’t anticipate any problems with the Wizengamot, if that’s what you mean,” he said, just a shade too casually. 

That was part of what she had meant, but it was far from being all that she meant, and she knew that he knew it, too. _What about us, Draco? I’m so afraid that I don’t fit into this world, your world, whether you do win the case or not._ She felt instinctively that he would win the case, though. That part wasn’t what she was worried about, but she couldn’t have said, herself, what the fear really was that seemed to hang over her with an oppressive dread. 

She put her fingers on his cheek, and he closed his eyes and leaned into her cupped hand briefly. It was the gesture of tenderness that had always belonged to them. 

Then he was gone, and she was left sitting on the ornately carved four-poster bed, staring at its plastered wall, hung with Holbein’s original line drawing of Anne Boleyn. 

As always, she suspected that the most rational thing might be for her to just cut it off, just end what was between Draco Malfoy and herself, whatever that really was. As always, she knew that she wouldn’t. 

She winced as she got out of bed. Her left knee hurt and threatened to give way, as she knew that it probably always would. She’d been through three months of rehab because of a nasty knee injury, and she was starting to see the shape of what was to come, the end of any real shot at a professional Quidditch career. 

 

She arranged her clothes and stole out the back door, meaning to leave by the footpath that wound into the woods and to an Apparition point at the edge of the grounds. Behind her, she heard a footstep. At first, she thought that it was an elf from the stables nearby. _This is not good._ She and Draco had already been seen together by a house-elf or two at more than one of the family estates, and he’d always insisted that his status as the Malfoy heir outweighed the need for the elves to report anything to his father, or anyone else. Ginny wasn’t so sure. 

But then she realized what she would have known instinctively if she’d been raised in the Malfoy code and class. Well-trained elves didn’t make any noise at all, not even stable-elves, and those belonging to the Malfoys were the best.

She turned round, very slowly. 

Lucius Malfoy smiled pleasantly down at her. Somehow, she thought, that smile didn’t look like the one on his son’s face at all. 

She sat stiffly at the tea table in the back parlor of the main house, clutching a cup of rapidly cooling tea. The Royal Dolton tea service was exquisite, and she had distinctly heard the silver cream pitcher sniff. If a teapot could turn up his nose at her, she was sure that she had seen that, too. Lucius Malfoy had filled ten or fifteen minutes’ conversation with observations about the weather, the gardens, and the early tea roses, and he showed no sign of coming to the point anytime soon. 

Finally, she set down her teacup on the saucer. “I know you don’t like me,” she said flatly. 

“I think you’re a charming girl. More sugar?”

Ginny thought that her glaring face probably looked anything but charming at that moment. “What I mean is that I know you don’t think I’m good enough for Draco.”

“I’m afraid you don’t quite understand.” Lucius dropped another lump into his own cup. “It’s not a matter of what _I_ think. The Malfoys have a position to uphold. One not entirely of our making, perhaps, but there you are.”

“I suppose you don’t think my family’s good enough. Is that it?”

“Certain behavior patterns on your part…” Lucius looked delicately away. 

“Oh. So it’s something I’ve done, or that you think I’ve done.”

“You must admit, Miss Weasley, that your multiple liaisons with all those other men before my son appeared in the picture… they wouldn’t look well,” he said, sipping at his tea. 

Her mouth fell open. “That’s not true.”

“So you deny that you… ah… were involved with these men? Michael Corner… Dean Thomas… Neville Longbottom… and, of course, Harry Potter…?”

“I _knew_ them. But not in the way that you’re trying to imply—“

“I’m afraid that there’s a certain standard required. It sounds positively Victorian, I know, but women associated with the Malfoy family have always been, shall we say, above reproach. It’s an unfortunate expectation, but there you are.”

Her hands gripped the table. “Look, if you’re trying to find out if I’m a slut, I’m not. Draco was my first, and he knows it, and it’s none of your damn business anyway!” She sat back with a red face. 

He added cream, every tiny movement of his hands the epitome of grace. Draco was like that too, she thought crazily. But it wasn’t the same. Draco’s gestures were graceful and elegant, but they weren’t sinister, and Lucius Malfoy’s were, somehow. “How very interesting, Miss Weasley,” he said. 

“Did you already know that was the truth?” she asked after a pause. “Or was that the exact information that you were trying to find out all along?”

Lucius smiled in a way that she instinctively knew meant nothing good. “No, I can’t say that I knew; in fact, I had always been inclined to doubt that this was the situation _vis a vis_ Draco and yourself. But yes, it’s quite vital that I know the facts in this matter. They make for a more serious problem than I had anticipated. You and he have bonded to a degree that I doubt either of you comprehend fully.”

She was beginning to comprehend, all right. She tightened her jaw. “Then I don’t see that there’s a problem at all. Or if there is, it’s all in your own mind, and it’s got nothing to do with us.”

“It is a bond that cannot be allowed to continue or to be made permanent. No, no—“ He gestured with his palm down when she shoved her chair back and started to get up. “I believe that you will want to hear everything that I have to say. I’ve always admired the Weasley spirit; I have no doubt that opposition would only harden your resolve—if you only had yourself to consider.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Lucius leaned forward. “It means that Draco is attending the final hearing at the Wizengamot at this moment, and, as you know, the decision will be handed down within weeks.”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with—“

“Its final outcome? My dear Miss Weasley, the fate of the Malfoy fortunes hangs by a thread. Any crucial piece of information of which the Wizengamot does not approve might represent the final snip. The Weasleys are the darlings of the wizarding world at the moment. So…” He allowed his words to train off delicately. 

There was a long, awful silence, which gave Ginny plenty of time to think about the mores of the wizarding world. Among purebloods, many of them were a throwback to a much earlier age, prejudices that Muggles had largely discarded long ago. Girls were expected to be virgins when they married. True, they were now a lot more likely to bend the rules _before_ the wedding, but there still needed to be one in the offing. Ginny was more than aware of the whispers behind her back in the Hogwarts days simply because she’d dated and kissed several boys. Even with Harry, she had done little more—when they were both at school, at least-- but her reputation was sealed in the eyes of some people. A serious sexual liaison between the offspring of feuding families opened too many cans of flobberworms to count, but it would have been a lot less problematic if Ginny had shagged her way through Hogwarts before bedding down with Draco. As it was, she had given him something that bonded them forever, whether they ever formalized that bond or not. 

But pureblood wizarding society accepted these rules even as they looked uneasily back on an earlier time, when there were no wands and all magic was primal, when they worshipped the Goddess and the Year-King, and when witches had chosen their own lovers. The wizarding world had held onto this era long after Muggles had blotted out most traces of it; when this part of Malfoy Manor had been built, Ginny thought, it was far from erased. The past could never really _be_ erased, and its echoes co-existed with the present. What it all meant in this case was that the image of virgin and whore were precariously balanced, and girls weren’t necessarily at fault if they fell all the way from one to the other. 

In this situation, thought Ginny, _Draco_ would be the one blamed. Not her. At first, anyway. She saw it now. 

She’d always known this, Ginny thought drearily. Draco had tried to tell her, time and again. She’d never wanted to believe it, so she had never admitted it. 

“So my being associated with Draco wouldn’t help him,” said Ginny. “It would only hurt him.”

Lucius shrugged. “You’re a clever girl. I’m sure that you can imagine words poured out by the pen of, say, Rita Skeeter.”

Ginny could indeed. _Sinister Malfoy Heir Seduces Sweet, Spunky Weasley Girl! Did the dashing and dastardly Draco divest Ginny Weasley of her innocence? Sources say yes. Heartbroken Harry Potter refuses comment, but the wizarding world is all agog. And in this author’s opinion, such a dirty deed could only expose all the cracks in his crucial case before the Wizengamot._

But then, too, there were those who remembered the wildly overinflated rumours from her teenage years. There would be a backlash against her before much time had passed, which would make the situation even worse for Draco—and for her own family. 

Lucius smiled at her. “Think about what I’ve said, Miss Weasley.”

She shoved her chair back, upsetting the tea, feeling the hot liquid drip down the cheap fabric of her trousers. 

Ginny was at the _Will o’ the Wisp_ in London at four o’clock. Draco was not. She stayed for over an hour, until the happy hour crowd really began to straggle in, and then went out and searched the streets. She couldn’t find him.

Her owls went unanswered. 

She called Blaise Zabini, knowing that he now had a Muggle cell phone. He claimed that he hadn’t heard from Draco in weeks. It was always hard to be sure if Blaise was telling the truth, but in this instance, she thought that he was. He sounded too brassed off at Draco himself to lie convincingly. 

She drove up the back way to Hever Castle in Kent in a Muggle car, so that the spells wouldn’t be alerted to her presence. She sat just outside a rusty back gate for a long time, listening to the ticking of the engine, wondering if the car really was the reason why none of the hexes had risen against her. Maybe not. It might well be that the land itself recognized what she had given to Draco; what they had given to each other. Or at least, she’d thought that the gift had been mutual. 

After a while, she drove away. 

Ginny went back to her flat in London. She watched at the window for the Malfoy eagle owl for a few days, and then she retreated to the couch and ate chocolate, refusing to see anyone. _Dr. Mopesy’s Magical Chocolate—Better than Prozac_ did not do the trick, so she started on Hershey’s Special Dark. 

Luna arrived on the fourth day and gave her a stern talking-to about the prevalence of Woebegone Wopsillers in cheap candy bars. Then she opened a box of Bonnat Chuao Village Dark that she had brought, and she held a crying Ginny for several hours as they ate a pound of chocolate between them.

Things were better after that. Or maybe not _better_ , exactly, but Ginny firmly decided that she wasn’t going to allow a nasty pretentious lying uncaring incapable-of-real-love prig like _Draco Malfoy_ to destroy her life. She vacillated between this thought and the opinion that she had nobly sacrificed their love for his sake, which was always a little more cheering. Then she would remember all of the returned owls she’d sent to him, and many more chocolate bars were required. 

George began to carry the brand, and they sold well, but Ginny could see that _Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes_ was a doomed cause overall. Fred had been the idea generator, the brilliant sun around which George had revolved, and by this point, the remaining twin had lost all faith in himself. 

She and Luna found him barricaded in his flat after a few weeks, staring at old pictures of Fred. Ginny snatched one of them out of his hand. 

“You’ve got to stop this, George,” she said without preamble. “It’s not what Fred would want you to do, and you know it.”

“Oi! I’ve been stuck on this broom for _days_ now because he keeps wanting to relive the last big Quidditch match,” the photo-Fred mouthed at her. “Everyone else is feasting at the Great Hall. Tell him to get the hell off that couch and let me go.”

Ginny tried to never interact with the people in wizarding photographs, not Fred, not old snaps of Harry from when she had thought she loved him, not Dennis Creevey, who had been her friend along with Colin. It pulled so hard at her heart that she knew she’d never be able to do anything besides look back, if she let herself. She nodded, and then she touched the photo with a single finger, because she couldn’t help it. 

“Ah,” said Fred. “The touch of the living. It’s not a good idea, Gin. But I never had a chance to say goodbye.”

She nodded, deciding not to speak. 

“By the way, Gin. Make it up with Malfoy,” said Fred. 

“ _What_?” she demanded. 

“You heard me.” He gave her a cheeky grin. “Couldn’t stand the little f… ah, _ferret_ when I was alive, but you get a lot more perspective in the afterlife, believe me.”

“Hmmph.” She put the picture face down on the side table and turned back to George. Luna was shaking her finger in his face and saying something about Melancholia Mimsworts, and Ginny hoped that neither one of them had heard the conversation at all. 

“The shop’s a failure,” groaned George. “I’ve let everybody down. I’ve—“

“That’s it,” said Ginny. “There’s no more whining allowed. And don’t think that _I_ don’t want to start in.” She dropped to the couch. 

George and Luna exchanged glances. Ginny knew that they both had to be aware of the doctor’s final verdict. No more Quidditch for her—ever. 

“And as long as we’re on the subject of horrible failures, which we seem to be,” said Luna, “the Quibbler’s about to fold.” 

“Is there any more chocolate?” asked George.

About a pound and a half later, the future looked brighter. The three of them lay on the living room rug and began discussing ideas, the first of which involved buying George a vacuum cleaner. After that, various projects were proposed. 

“A magical pet shop,” suggested Luna. 

“No,” said George. “I don’t even like Kneazles.”

 

“That’s right out, then,” said Ginny. “A miniature golf course?”

George grimaced. “Don’t you think those are rather creepy? I saw one once that was filled with strange miniature Ferris wheels manned by house-elves who’d escaped from evil wizarding households. Malfoy elves mostly, come to think of it.”

“Oh, don’t!” exclaimed Ginny involuntarily. 

More glances were exchanged between Luna and George. Ginny wasn’t sure how much they’d known about what had happened between her and Draco. She’d once overheard Ron, Charlie, and Percy discussing methods of trapping Draco inside of a kettle and keeping him there for an indefinite length of time through the use of Confinement spells. Ron had rejected the idea as too complicated and had cast his vote for a simple Rusty Razor hex. Charlie preferred a plan involving hungry dragons and a corral into which they would be driven prior to dropping Draco inside with no means of escape. Ginny hadn’t wanted to listen to any more after that. But she’d never heard anything along those lines from George. 

“There’s another idea, you know,” said Luna. “Speaking of Ferris wheels. Although I’m not saying there would actually be one. They wouldn’t be very historically accurate.”

Ginny had long since figured out that what-the-hell-are-you-talking about type questions weren’t very helpful when dealing with Luna. She waited patiently for the rest. 

“Tudorland,” said Luna. 

 

“Tudors and Ferris wheels,” said George. “There’s something I’m not quite grasping yet.”

“Dad has a lease on some land in Kent, and he’s never been able to figure out what to do with it,” said Luna, with a patient air. “That’s where Tudorland will be.”

“An amusement park,” said Ginny. She sat up. “It could work. It really could.”

A current of excitement started to run through the room as the three of them discussed plans. George would provide funding from the sale of WWW, Luna would contribute the space and any other assistance she could provide, and Ginny would handle artistic design and write scripts. Together, they would coordinate other creative aspects, and George thought that they could call Colin Creevey in as business manager. Ginny was thrilled. She realized that George needed a project like this desperately, she herself might mope around for months or even years without it, and Luna seemed deeply involved already. She watched her brother and her friend press their heads together, dishwater blonde and dark red, and she tried to hide a secret smile. She’d be willing to bet that something would develop _there._

But when she first started creating the drawings for the different sets, she found that they all came out looking like the Tudor cottage on the grounds of Hever Castle. She scowled, erased the pages vigorously, and began again, wishing that memories could be deleted as easily as penciled lines. 

A month after the plans began, Ginny was out with Luna at the _Will o’ the Wisp_ , a place she would rather not have gone at all. But then she had despised her own cowardice, and they went. She sat at the table while Luna had disappeared to the bathroom. She saw a tall man with ashy-silver hair standing on the other side of the bar, dressed in expensive Muggle clothing, which he wore like an elegant second skin. His head was bent. Draco looked up, and his eyes met Ginny’s shocked ones on the way. He stared at her for what seemed like an eternity.

But eternity clearly had an end, because before she could properly realize what was happening, he was somehow standing next to her. 

Her hands cried out to touch him. She sat on them. 

“Weasley,” he finally said. 

“Oh. So it’s Weasley now, is it?”

Draco shook his head, not in negation, she thought, but more as if he were trying to clear it and failing completely. 

“Tell me what I ought to call you, then,” he said at last. 

“If you don’t remember,” she said icily, “then I’m not going to be the one to tell you.”

A thin woman with a long, horse-like face walked across the room. Ginny recognized Astoria Greengrass. She said something or other in a whiny whisper, leaning towards Draco, trying to cling to his arm.

“You’re more than welcome to him, Greengrass,” Ginny said icily. 

Astoria yanked him to the bar and pulled his head down, and he allowed her to kiss him. Ginny considered striding across the room and throwing a full glass of Zinfandel in his face. But what was the point? At least now she knew, she told herself again and again. Draco had seen her, he hadn’t reacted in the slightest, unless you counted that strange game he’d been playing, and he was clearly with Astoria now. She would at least keep a scrap of dignity by not running after him. 

The next day, Ron showed up in Ginny’s flat while she was poring over plans on a drawing table. He picked her up and whirled her around in a circle just as he’d used to do when they were children, an enormous smile on his face. 

“Gin, this is brilliant.” He paged through the drawings with more enthusiasm than art appreciation, in Ginny’s opinion, but it was still welcome. “Much better than Quidditch.”

Ginny rolled her eyes. “You’re laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?”

Ron looked up, his face unexpectedly serious for a moment. “No, I don’t think I am. Don’t get me wrong, you would have been a great professional Chaser. But there’s so much more that you can do, Gin. Like this.” He traced a finger above a sketch of a Tudor costume with billowing sleeves, a jeweled kirtle, and an embroidered bodice. “And you’ve got a brain for business, too. I don’t know if you ever would have used it.”

“Does that mean you’re going to use it now?” asked Colin, staggering in with a load of ledgers and quills, which he dumped onto the table. “Because somebody around here has to. I can’t do it all, you know, and George and Luna have been talking to elf-builders all day.”

“In a minute, Colly,” said Ginny, gathering up the sketches. Ron gave her business manager a nod. He’d looked at Colin gimlet-eyed the first couple of times he’d seen the younger man with Ginny after Hogwarts, but had eventually figured out that he was bent as a used paper clip and his sister’s extremely platonic friend. 

“’Lo, Ron,” said Colin, busily opening an enormous book, its pages covered in red ink scrawls. “Good to see you, as always. And…” He glanced up, over Ginny’s shoulder. There was something about the look in his round brown eyes that told Ginny what—no, who—he saw just then, although she wasn’t at all sure why it was so telling.

She turned round. “Hello, Harry,” she said. 

The faintest possible guilty look on Ron’s face told her everything. He’d been making reunion attempts for months on end. But she didn’t mind seeing Harry now. It wasn’t that she really wanted to, but then, she couldn’t really say that she wanted much of anything besides working on Tudorland. On the whole, she didn’t care. No; she revised her opinion when he stepped forward. She wanted to care about Harry Potter and the fact that he was standing in her flat, but she couldn’t. 

On the other hand, she supposed that it would be very ungracious to tell him to go away. 

“Hello, Ginny,” he said. “I heard that you might need some help.”

The old irritation flitted across her mind again at the implication that there was something, anything, that she couldn’t handle on her own. But he was sincere, as always, and the truth was that they did need all the help they could get with the entire project.

“Yes,” she said, and they all sat down and began to talk. She tried to ignore the satisfied smile on Ron’s face. 

A week or so later, she was walking down a street near her flat with Harry, George, and Luna the next day, talking animatedly about plans for costumes. They turned a corner, and she saw Draco Malfoy coming out of a jewelry shop. _Buying something for Astoria, I’m sure!_ she thought. George and Luna stopped to look at something in the window; they were considerably behind her and Harry by now, and she was pretty sure that they hadn’t seen Dr-- _Malfoy_ , she meant. She cleared her throat ostentatiously as she and Harry walked by the door where he’d exited. Draco stiffened and gave her the strangest look she had ever seen on his face, as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was, or who she ought to be in relation to himself. She looked back at him, icily. 

It took only a moment, and Ginny was never sure, then or ever, if Harry had really caught all of it. But he tightened his hold on her arm and hurried her down the street. He kept holding her, and she saw a trace of the sweet smile on his face that had been the first thing she noticed about him. She began to realize how unfair she was probably being to him, but there was also an undercurrent of dread in that feeling. 

_Oh, what does it matter anyway!_

+++


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all readers! :)

CHAPTER TWO  
ONE YEAR LATER

+++

“Please,” said Ginny, trying to keep her voice steady. 

The wind ruffled his hair, that dark thick hair she had once loved so much. Harry wasn’t looking at her. 

Instead, he stared out the open window of the unfinished model of the Mobius Castle. It currently had the appearance of the Chateau du Vert, the re-creation that the construction elves were working on right at that moment. Ginny could hear the hammering, and the whine and buzz of the table saw. She and George had decided that real building techniques would provide the most durable foundation for the spells of illusion, and there were still a few kinks to iron out. 

Not that it would make any difference if they were never able to even _have_ an opening weekend. 

“I’m just asking you to be reasonable, Harry.” She knew that it was the kind of thing George would want her to say. She didn’t feel reasonable herself, at that moment. 

He turned his head towards her. There was a look Harry Potter had when he wasn’t going to be reasonable either, no matter how important it was, no matter how much it meant. Especially, Ginny thought resentfully, no matter how much it meant to her. She shouldn’t be resentful. Oh, this was the worst time to feel that way. But she had never been very good at controlling her emotions, especially not when it came to him. Not that he’d ever seemed to notice. 

“We can’t go on with it if you won’t play your part!” Her voice was rising, in spite of her attempts to control it. “You have to play Henry for at least the opening. That’s for only _one_ weekend, Harry. Just two days. That’s all. After that, you never need to see me again if you don’t want to.” 

He turned all the way towards her then. She was sure that he was about to deliver a very old lecture, the one about _not being overdramatic_ , Ginny, not showing the emotions that she wore on her sleeve and he did not. There were times when she’d wondered if Harry really had any emotions at all, at least where she was concerned, and the last year hadn’t convinced her otherwise. But he only put his hands behind his back and started to pace. “Ginny, I know you think that I’m doing this to hurt you.”

“I didn’t say—“

“I’m not. I’m trying to help you, and George too. You shouldn’t go on with this.”

“If we can’t open in a week, we’ll lose everyth—“

He went on as if he hadn’t heard her, talking over her, as he so often had in the past. 

“Ginny, you both need to stop now, while there’s still time. The Wizengamot will come down on you hard once they know that Malfoy’s the major investor.”

She gaped at him. “What?”

“You didn’t know?” He examined her face in the sunlight. “You really didn’t.” His voice took on a softer tone. “Ginny, they’ll shut you down.”

“I..” She fumbled for words. The summer day had turned to ice. “I don’t see why they would.”

“Because they haven’t been able to prove that he was using money he shouldn’t, investments he kept from his father’s estate. But if this goes ahead, they will. They’ll go through the books, and they’ll have their excuse, the one they’ve been waiting for.” 

“Even if it’s true, they wouldn’t do it if _you_ were involved.” She instantly regretted saying the words.

Harry sighed. “It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“It would,” Ginny persisted. “Forget about me. Do it for George.”

“Getting both of you out of this mess is the best thing I could possibly do for George.” Harry’s face took on the lines that Ginny had long ago privately dubbed his “noble look.” 

“You’ve tried talking to him, haven’t you. And it didn’t work,” she guessed. 

His lips tightened, but he said nothing.

“If you’re quite done, I need to get the dancing costumes to the wardrobe elf,” she said. 

He looked as if he were about to say something more, but he started out the door. At the last second, he turned back. “Where’s Hermione?”

“She… um… left,” said Ginny. 

The door, slammed. She slumped into a chair behind an unfinished wall with a long, exhausted sigh. It was another failed conversation with Harry. She wondered if she’d ever really had any other kind. _I should have known something like this would happen,_ she thought. _Everything was going too well._

 

And for the past year, it had. They’d even worked out the marketing. Wizards would love the park. But the key was that it also would appeal to so many Muggle tourists, and especially, George reminded her, to Americans. It would be easy to keep mild spells of concealment and Befuddlement around any of the tricky little details. For instance, Muggles would know that Harry was an important person, a celebrity, but they wouldn’t quite know why, and afterwards, they wouldn’t remember anything they shouldn’t. 

 

The theme park would be the first major opportunity she’d ever had to display her abilities to the public. In the past few months, she’d realized that she didn’t even miss playing on a professional team anymore. Art gave her a freedom and creativity that outmatched anything she had ever felt from flying. Although there were times when she still wished she dared to try a pickup game or two. Like the ones she used to play with—

 

Ginny instantly cut off that thought, before the name could even occur to her.

 

But it all depended on that opening week. The key parts in tableaux and masques and jousts had all been given to former Hogwarts students that would draw crowds, and Harry would have been the star. He’d agreed to play the part of the young King Henry VIII for just those first few performances—or so they’d thought. She looked at the discarded costume, flung over a chair, and she sighed. But she couldn’t help snidely thinking that at least they wouldn’t have the problem of padding the codpiece.

_Not that it matters if we don’t have the opening at all! Oh, this can’t be happening. Harry must have been wrong._

+++

She marched into the park office, slammed the door so hard that the temporary building shook, and stood with her arms crossed. George looked up from behind the desk and gave a long sigh. 

“Harry just told me that Malfoy is the major investor,” she said without preamble. 

George couldn’t meet her eyes. Her heart sank. She’d been praying that it wasn’t true; she hadn’t wanted to believe it, but she hadn’t really been able to fool herself. Whatever Harry’s faults might be, he never lied, never really even exaggerated. He could be easily fooled by lies or incorrect information from someone else, which was she thought might have happened. But no. He had been telling no more than the simple truth. She didn’t even need George to say a single word to confirm it. He did, of course. 

“It’s true,” he said. 

She slumped against a wall. “Oh, no. _No._ ”

“I know what you’re thinking, Gin.”

“Then why were you mad enough to do this?” she wailed. 

George seemed to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to his quill. “I didn’t have much a choice if I wanted us to open next week.”

“But Harry said that if we use Malfoy’s money, then the Wizengamot will come down hard on him, which means, by logical extension, _us._ ” 

“I don’t believe that,” said George. “And Malfoy helped me when nobody else would. Please try to understand, Gin.”

“There’s nothing _to_ understand. Malfoy is just a… a horrible person!” she finished wildly. 

George sighed. “I’m not claiming that I like him. I’m not saying that we’re going to be best mates. But…” he let the sentence trail off, and Ginny couldn’t quite meet his eyes. 

She’d never told anyone in her family about what had happened between herself and the Malfoys a year before, just as she’d never told them about the first time that she and Draco had been together. But she’d always worn her heart on her sleeve much more than she’d wanted to. She suspected that her brothers at least knew that her most recent relationship with Draco had both existed and ended, and she doubted she’d been able to hide the fact that it had ended badly. She wasn’t sure if she really even wanted to try. That was more than enough ammunition for six of her brothers to hate Draco Malfoy with the passion of a thousand suns forever after, which they did. But she’d always known that George never felt quite the same way, and she wondered now how much he’d really guessed. _Or what kind of lies Dr—I mean, Malfoy, has been feeding him._

“This is what Fred would have wanted, Gin,” George said quietly. 

Ginny swallowed past a sudden lump in her throat. “Fine. I’ll go along with it. We’ll probably all be sent to Azkaban week after next. Maybe I should pack a bag right now.” She walked to the window and looked out at the grounds. “What does Luna have to say about this?” she asked without turning round.

“She’s fine with it,” George said blandly, leaving Ginny to wonder just how much she didn’t know about what was really going on. She thought she saw something moving at the very end of the gardens, but she was staring almost straight into the late afternoon sun, and she decided that she had imagined it. 

A knock came at the door. Ginny opened it to see a pair of legs topped by a pile of teetering costumes.

“I hope I’m not _interrupting_ anything,” said a muffled voice from the middle. 

“No, Lun,” said Ginny. “Come on in.”

Ginny took the armful of sleeves and neatly stacked them on a side table, not without some difficulty. Luna Lovegood was revealed. 

“I _do_ hope these will be good enough,” she said, walking to the desk where George was sitting as she spoke. “I remembered that you said that rhinestones weren’t historically accurate at all. There shouldn’t be any left.” 

“They’re great.” Ginny bent over the pile, fingering a set of billowing silk ribbons embroidered with seed pearls. Nearly Headless Nick had provided samples, for old times’ sake, as he graciously explained, and Ginny had decided not to ask if a spot of time-travel thievery had been involved. 

“How far are they on the gardens?” she asked. “I can’t tell from here.” 

“They’ve just finished the rosebushes,” said Luna. “You can see them from the window in the hall. Let’s go and look.” Her tone was a little too bland and restrained. 

“Sounds like a good plan,” said George, rising to his feet. 

Ginny looked from her brother to her friend suspiciously, but she followed them both out the door and to the start of a long corridor. 

“Oh, and by the way, I meant to tell you something, Ginny,” said Luna in a wispy tone that Ginny had learned to distrust. It usually presaged earth-shattering events of which Luna had not informed her until the last possible moment, and sometimes after it. 

“What is it now, Lun?”

“Draco Malfoy will be coming here.”

“I guess there was no way around that,” said Ginny. “Is he going to be at a meeting with George, or something?” Given enough warning and a head start, she could avoid him. 

“No,” said George, sounding blander than ever. 

“It’s my fault. I don’t think I’m being clear enough today,” said Luna. “Historical recreations do tend to attract _Flagella Anachronisti,_ , and once they’ve made their way into your ear, well, it’s difficult to keep track of everything you ought. I mean that we’re _all_ going to meet with him.

“But I don’t _want_ to meet Malfoy,” said Ginny, perfectly aware that she sounded like a whiny nine-year-old. 

“I’m afraid you’ll have to do it, Gin,” said George. 

“But why?” 

They turned a corner. And then Ginny knew exactly why. 

“Oh, no. No!” she said in a whimper, which she hated as soon as she heard the sound coming out of her own mouth. 

Draco Malfoy stood at the end of the corridor, a tall thin figure, his distinct features blotted out by the sun at his back streaming in through the window that looked out onto the garden. It didn’t matter, thought Ginny. She would have known him anywhere. 

“We’ll be back in just a moment,” said Luna. 

Before Ginny could even open her mouth to scream, it was too late. Luna and George had disappeared around a corner, and she was left trying not to look at Draco Malfoy. 

He stepped forward, and she saw his face in the less direct sunlight from the windows along the corridor, a little thinner than a year before, his cheekbones more finely drawn, his long nose a bit sharper. His clothing looked as if it had been carefully tailored and taken in. She wondered if he’d been eating properly, and immediately squelched the thought. After the past year, she shouldn’t care.

Wasn’t he going to say anything? He just kept standing there, his hands in his pockets in an uncharacteristically casual gesture. But he looked tense, somehow. _He should_ , she thought. _After what he did to me._ But her thoughts faltered at that point. _After what we did to each other, maybe,_ a tiny honest voice whispered in the bottom of her mind. She ignored it, as she so had often done whenever thoughts of meeting Draco Malfoy again intruded in her mind

“Hello, Malfoy,” she finally said. 

Had he winced just slightly, she wondered? Had he really expected her to call him _Draco_? Well, she didn’t care if he had.

“Hello… Weasley.” The old, familiar voice, the low drawl mixing with that cut-glass, impossibly upper-class accent. She had loved his voice long before she ever loved him, or admitted that she liked him. She steeled herself against the sound. 

_Now_ what? Was he going to say something along the lines of _It’s good to see you again, Gi—no, Weasley, he had better never call me anything but Weasley again! Then what do I say? I can’t say the same, Malfoy? Or, I can say the same?_ But she couldn’t say any such thing, because that would open the door to confessions she would rather die than make. 

_Why, Draco? Why? Tell me. Just explain it all, so that I won’t ever wonder again._ That would be even worse. 

Looking at him in the long rays of sunlight, because she could do nothing else, Ginny could really only come to one conclusion. Even unfinished and fake, Whitehall castle was the proper setting for Draco Malfoy.

“George told me that you stepped in as a major investor,” she said abruptly. 

He nodded. Apparently, he really was going to use his old trick he’d always brought out whenever he wanted to be really irritating. He would say a lot less than she did, allowing her to be the one who went further and further out onto a conversational limb. 

“Well, what do you want now?” she asked, wincing at how ungracious she sounded. 

He seemed to think over the question. She really wished that she hadn’t asked it. She wished that she had never known him, or at least never thought of him as anything more than Harry’s pale, pointy-faced nemesis. She wished that she at least knew why he seemed to be pretending that this was the case. 

Draco stepped a little closer. “I…”

“Yes?”

He looked more uncertain than she had ever seen him. 

He spread his hands apart in an equally uncharacteristic gesture, almost helpless. Almost pleading. Well, it was a year too late to plead with her. “Ginny…”

She stepped forward and stabbed him in the chest with a finger. “Don’t call me by my first name,” she hissed. “I never, ever want to hear you doing that again. You’ve given up the right.”

She expected his face to close off, to become an immobile mask, but it didn’t. He seemed about to say something else, but before he could, she stomped back down the hall, biting the inside of her mouth to keep from making another sound. 

Ginny walked slowly back to the office. Luna was arranging several costumes on padded hangers. “Oh, Gin. You’re back. We’ll need to see tomorrow at the dress rehearsal if any of these have to be altered.”

“Altered? For what?” asked Ginny. Then she recognized the clothing. It was the costume for Henry VIII, the wrestling scene. The one that Harry was supposed to wear. She began to have a very bad feeling about the entire thing. 

“Didn’t Draco tell you? He’s going to play Henry.” 

“Draco? Since when did you start calling him—“

“He’ll be perfect. The king had much lighter hair than Harry does, you know,” said Luna. 

“I don’t care what kind of hair he had!” She whirled on George. “How could you let this happen?”

“Er…” George suddenly seemed to be very interested in the wooden floor. 

“Not that Henry was exactly blond,” said Luna. “He was more of a redhead. But his son, Edward VI, had really light hair. He’s the one who only lived to the age of sixteen, you know. So sad. And of course, Draco’s a direct descendant. I think that Harry was only some kind of ninety-eighth Tudor cousin through his father. It’ll work so much better.”

It was clearly hopeless. 

After Luna left, Ginny groaned and collapsed into a chair. “George, you can’t be serious about this. You just can’t.” 

“Malfoy’s just saved us,” said George. “Providing financial backing wouldn’t have been enough on its own—no, listen to me, Gin, you know I’m right. Not after Harry pulled out of the main role. But everyone will line up to see Draco Malfoy.”

“I’m sure they will. Everybody’s a looky-loo for a discredited Death Eater.”

“The publicity will be incredible,” George said quietly. 

“I know it _would_ be, but-- look, George, I happen to know that under the terms of the agreement the Malfoys reached with the Wizengamot, he’s supposed to be kept alive.”

“I wasn’t really planning on assassinating him.”

“I think you know what I mean.” Ginny had the feeling that was fighting a losing battle, but she went on anyway. “If you actually let Malfoy do this... Percy would arrange a jousting accident. Charlie would accidentally let a dragon slip through the enclosure. Bill would forget to take the powders and then coincidentally happen to be near Malfoy during the full moon. Ron—oh, I’m not even going to get started; we could be here all day just listing the ways he’d like to kill Malfoy, and those are only the ones we know about.”

“So it would bother you if someone offed Malfoy?” George asked, with just the slightest hint of slyness, if her opinion. 

“Yes! Well, I mean, only because of the bad publicity. That’s all. Anyway, I’m not done. Dad would… okay, it probably wouldn’t be very dramatic; he’d just go out to the garage and never come back again. But…” Ginny glared at him before hauling out the heavy ammunition. “If Malfoy showed up for dinner, Mum _wouldn’t feed him!_ ”

George winced. “That’s harsh, Gin.”

“And it should be. Everyone in the family hates him, and they always have done. You’ve got to admit that.”

“Fred didn’t. I know. A surprise, right? But he didn’t, not even at Hogwarts.”

For a horrible instant, Ginny was actually tempted to tell George exactly what really had happened the year before. But there were limits, even for her temper. She knew that she would give in to the latest mad idea. It was the craziest of all, if you asked her, which clearly, nobody had. 

“It’s Malfoy’s ideal,” muttered Ginny. “He’ll be playing an egomaniac tyrant who had women falling all over him his entire life! It’s perfect. No acting required.”

George smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t let him behead him anybody in the cast.”

“He certainly won’t, if I behead him first,” Ginny added under her breath, low enough so that she knew she was giving George an excuse to pretend he hadn’t heard it. 

The next morning, Ginny walked down the path that led through the formal rose garden, her heart beating faster than the exercise could account for. She took the small plastic rectangle from her pocket and tapped its surface, paging through little photographs of various structures. 

She’d had a horrible argument with Hermione a few months ago over this equipment, which was used to keep track of all the information about the theme park and to coordinate the spells needed. The other girl’s idea had been dull and uninteresting, in Ginny’s opinion—providing all of the information in one database and requiring everyone to go into a central computer terminal and sift through hundreds of pages of tedious text in order to find their part. Ginny had pushed for individual spelled communicators that held both general information and unique content for each performer, presented with lots of colorful graphics. She was already referring to them as “smartcomms”, and the look on Hermione’s face had not been encouraging. 

“If you’re thinking of the system of the coins each person in the DA used during fifth year, Ginny, that wasn’t the ideal way to handle it. Centralized information would have worked more effectively,” Hermione had said in the superior tones that had always set her teeth on edge.

“I didn’t get the idea from you. Other people are capable of coming up with ideas, you know,” Ginny had replied, and the argument had spiraled downhill from there. Hermione kept hinting that Ginny simply didn’t have the attention span to pull the entire thing off, Ginny had grown red-faced and yelled that books and cleverness didn’t substitute for real creativity, shoes had been taken off and thrown, and both of them had finally left in a huff.

Hermione had never really gotten over it, and she’d mostly pulled back from the whole project. Ginny had been miserable for days afterwards. The only bright spot, in her opinion, was that Hermione and Ron had finally broken up. She’d always, _always_ known that they were wrong for each other. 

Draco would have helped her put everything in perspective, she thought. She could just imagine his amused smile, his cutting comments, his—

No, she couldn’t! Or, to be more precise, she wouldn’t. 

Ginny reached the tiny graphic of the Tower of London and punched it with unnecessary force. The air wavered slightly, revealing a stretch of green lawn alongside a massive, square castle of weathered white stone, a tower at each corner. Ron was standing on a wooden platform next to an executioner’s block and hefting an extremely realistic-looking axe. When he saw her, he waved. 

“I hope that’s fake,” said Ginny, walking up to her brother and giving him a careful hug. 

“It’s spelled to be styrofoam, but that could change,” Ron said ominously. “Isn’t Malfoy going to be in any of the shows?” He caressed the edge of the axe with a thumbnail.

“Not the way you mean,” sighed Ginny. “None of the Tudors were ever executed.”

“Yeah, well, none of the Tudors ever had a roller coaster at the palace, either,” said Ron.

“What?”

“Didn’t Luna tell you? It’s in her latest plan. Anyway, I’m just saying that we can throw in some extra history. Spice it up.” 

“Ron, there has to be a limit somewhere. Henry is the one who had other people beheaded, which you really should know after our going over the historical background a few zillion times,” said Ginny. They hadn’t been sure how many of the victims to include in the re-enactments. Various cardinals and bishops had been rejected because their inclusion might stir up religious controversies, so as of that day, only Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard would be on the block. (1)

“I’m just trying to figure out how historically accurate we really need to be. Couldn’t Malfoy get his head cut off instead?”

Ginny rolled her eyes. “We would need him alive for the next show, you know.”

“Oh. Right. That’s out, then.” 

Ginny sat on a stone bench and looked at her brother. “Ron, I don’t quite understand. You were supposed to be George Boleyn.” (2) 

“Somebody had to be the headsman,” said Ron, leaning on the axe. 

She narrowed her eyes. “Did you come up with this brilliant idea after finding out that Draco Malfoy took over the role of the king?”

Ron never had been very good at looking innocent, she decided. 

“You might as well know,” he said, not quite looking at her. “Perce and Charlie won’t be here. Somebody else will have to take over the rest of the Boleyn roles.” (3)

“Why?” demanded Ginny, pretty sure that she already knew. Bill had refused to even take a role, saying that it was better that way. 

 

“They said that they couldn’t be trusted around Malfoy, and they knew it. Didn’t want to ruin the opening weekend.”

“And you can be?” groaned Ginny. 

“Let’s continue the conversation later. There’s that evil ferret-faced little bastard again,” said Ron, jerking his thumb in the direction of the castle. “Sorry, Gin. I guess you’d better go talk to him, right? But don’t forget—I’m watching.”

Ginny walked towards Draco, uneasily aware of Ron standing in the background and fingering the edge of the axe. “All right, Malfoy. It’s almost time for the costume rehearsal. What do you want?” she asked, aware that she was repeating her question from yesterday. Well, she’d never really received an answer. 

He kept looking at her, that strange searching look that seemed to carry a wealth of meaning behind it. 

“A tour,” he said. 

“A… a _what_?” 

“Show me around the premises a bit.” 

“I’m not a tour guide, Malfoy.”

“I’m not a tourist. I’m an investor, remember?”

_As if you’d be allowed within a million miles of here otherwise,_ she thought. “Okay, come with me,” said Ginny. 

“After all, I’ve got to inspect my investment property,” said Draco. 

“You weren’t the only investor, Malfoy,” said Ginny through gritted teeth. 

“Actually, I was. Am, I should say. The rest pulled out.”

“After they heard you were the major one, I’ll bet!”

He didn’t answer her. She knew very well that reaction meant that she was right—it always had done before—but somehow, being right didn’t make her feel any better. 

The questions were threatening to burst out of her brain. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t ask them. Not when he was behaving as if there were nothing to ask. If he could do it, then so could she. 

They began to walk. 

“Here’s the Tower set,” she said, gesturing at the stone structure topped with turrets. “Most of the scenes and re-creations will be staged here, it’s simpler that way.”

Draco nodded.

 

“There’s the re-creation of the river.” She gestured at the shimmering water. He nodded again. She longed to get a reaction. “Do you want a tour of that? We’ve got a sea monster.”

“I think I’ll give it a miss. Where are the other sets?”

“They’re all here.” She couldn’t suppress a small smile. This had been a joint project between her, Luna, and George, and it had turned out very well. “We’re using a Mobius charm so that we can turn this area into Hampton Court and Whitehall when necessary. It’s really not difficult—it’s built into these smartcomms.” She held hers up and tapped the screen, displaying several drawings on a split screen. 

Draco peered at it closely—much too close for her comfort, in fact. “Very clever. Who designed those?” 

“I did.” She stuck out her chin aggressively. “I suppose it’s all too Muggle for you.”

“No.”

“And everyone else is surprised that Hermione didn’t do it. So you might as well be too, except that you hated her, so--”

“I’m not sixteen years old, Weasley, and it’s been a long time since I put myself to the trouble of hating Granger, or any other Muggleborn.”

His quiet tone was not what she had expected. 

“And I’m not surprised at all,” Draco went on. “I’ve always believed that you’re far more intelligent than Granger. But you didn’t apply yourself at school in the way that you have done here.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” said Ginny, turning away. She couldn’t believe that she’d actually considered discussing the subject with Dr-- _Malfoy_. 

“No, I don’t, at that. I wonder… I do wonder if I may have been a bad influence on you, somehow,” said Draco, moving just a bit closer. “If we knew each other well enough for that?” 

It struck her as a deeper question than it seemed to be, as if he were trying to get information without letting her know how little he knew. Which was ridiculous, of course. He was only playing a game, and she wouldn’t cooperate. 

“You’re a bad influence on everyone in the known universe who gets within a hundred kilometres of you.” She longed to turn and leave him standing there, but she knew that she couldn’t. 

“Anyway, here’s the garden setup at Hampton Court.” She tapped a button on her smartcomm. The air wavered, and a large, formal garden appeared. “Here’s the maze. I’m very proud of that.”

“I think the history’s a bit mixed up,” said Draco. “The maze wasn’t built until the eighteenth century.”

“What would you know about that?” she snapped. 

“I’ve dabbled in architecture, remember?”

“I know that’s what you say.” Ginny knew exactly how unfair she was being. He didn’t even have to tell her. She remembered those long, lazy Sunday afternoons when he had been sketching blueprints, sometimes using AutoCAD programs. How she had teased him about using a Muggle computer, a Muggle graphics program. How he had loftily reminded her that Linus Torvalds was a Squib, thank you very much, and he would never lower himself to touch a Windows product. 

“Okay. Never mind,” she said. “Why do you want to see everything, anyway?”

He gave her a long, searching look. “I don’t suppose you’ll accept simple curiousity as the reason?”

“Then you suppose right.” 

They turned a corner. 

“There’s only one spot of land that we just can’t get to turn, or even to stay as one location. It’s always in flux,” she went on. “That’s it.” She swept an arm towards a spot that was roughly the shape and size of a small house, perhaps including a lawn or garden. The landscape kept shifting and changing, shimmering in and out of focus. She continued to stare. She’d never spent very long looking at it; she and George had discussed the uncooperative space and decided to give up on trying to do anything with it. 

The longer she spent looking now, the more that it began to look familiar. She couldn’t have said why. 

“Do you recognize it?” murmured Draco in her ear, causing her to jump.

“I don’t recognize anything.” 

“I wondered if you would,” Draco continued, as if to himself. 

“Malfoy, if you’ve got something to say, please just say it.”

He hesitated. “This space is on Malfoy land.”

She gaped at him.

“Didn’t you know?”

“I… it… Luna said that her father had a long lease on it.”

“And so he does, although she was stretching the truth a bit. He leases about forty acres on the back of the property; they were once used to graze sheep. I added a bit. This bit.”

_Luna_ , thought Ginny. _I am going to kill her. And just how much does George know?_ She was starting to sense the outlines of a conspiracy more vast than she had previously imagined. 

“Well, I don’t see how it matters now. You’ve had your tour,” said Ginny. “Now let’s get back to the costume rehearsals.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all readers and kudo-leavers! :) BTW, this is a smutty chapter. ;)

CHAPTER THREE

“I didn’t want a tour,” said Draco. “I wanted to see you.”

There it was again, that technique he had, that honesty that had always thrown her off guard, sprinkled through his deceptions like gold dust through ore. She would not let it work this time. 

“You didn’t seem very interested in seeing me before,” said Ginny, continuing to walk. “And as far as I’m concerned—“

She stopped. It was as if the path had given itself a shake and pulled her back to where she had started out. She was still in front of the wavering space. 

Ginny tried again. 

Now she was walking towards the space. Draco was right behind her. 

She whirled on him. “What’s going on?”

Her head spun faster than her body, round and round; she broke into a run, but the ground snatched itself out from under her, she was being pulled towards the space now, pulled inexorably, and at last Draco’s hand reached out and gave her a shove, and she stumbled to her knees on the grass. 

Slowly, she stood up. 

She was looking at the Tudor cottage on the grounds of Hever Castle. 

Ginny picked herself up and brushed off the jeans she’d worn to work in that day, thinking stupidly that she’d never get the grass stains out. “You,” she said. “You planned this!”

“Yes,” said Draco flatly. 

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why.” 

He gave an odd half-shake of his head. 

“Well, it isn’t going to work,” she threw back over her shoulder as she began to stomp around the perimeter of the small house. 

But she quickly got an uneasy feeling that if Draco’s mysterious plans involved keeping her here, she was likely to be wrong. The house was completely surrounded by a thick mist. She couldn’t see anything outside it, and it was impenetrable to every spell she tried. When she attempted to push her hand through it, she only bruised her knuckles; there seemed to be a solid wall a few inches past the surface of the fog. Finally, she gave up and slumped against the front door of the house, trying not to cry. Draco had moved so that he was standing over her. 

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked without looking up. 

“I don’t know,” he said. 

“How can you not know?” 

His hand was on her shoulder, pulling her up. 

“Tell me, Ginny,” he said, his voice intense. “What were we to each other?”

“I…” How to even begin to answer a question like that? “I thought we were _something,_ Malfoy. Or at least I did until you didn’t meet me when you said you would, you didn’t return my owls, and you apparently dropped off the face of the earth.” 

He didn’t say a word. She looked away, longing to flee. But there was no getting away from him. Nowhere to go. She wiped the stupid, stupid, useless tears from her face, her head still down, and halfway through, she realized that her face was still wet. A cold rain had begun to fall. She grabbed at the doorknob and pulled the door open. 

A small fire crackled in the fireplace, warming the air. Ginny wondered if this house existed in some other dimension of time, where it wasn’t June. For all she knew, it easily could. She flopped down into a none-too-comfortable carved wooden chair and punched at her smartcomm again. Words flashed on the screen. 

_G,_

_I do hope you’re not upset. I mean, you might be upset right now, I suppose, but I’m sure you’ll change your mind by the morning. I wasn’t really getting the right sort of feeling that we need between Henry and Anne—with you and Draco, I mean. That’s quite an authentic Tudor cottage, you know. I’m sure that by morning, you’ll have all the authenticity you need._

_L_

Ginny groaned. She could almost hear Luna’s wispy voice speaking each word, just as she must have done when using M-Vox to record her stupid message. 

“This is awful.” She put her head down on the table. “Horrible. She conspired with you, Malfoy. Oh, don’t even bother to deny it.”

She heard the chair on the opposite side of the table being pushed back, and then felt a finger lifting up her chin. She tried to squirm away, but his well-remembered face was right there, only a few inches from hers, and she was well and truly trapped. 

“Don’t blame Luna,” said Draco. 

“You’re calling her by her first name, too,” said Ginny. “Just how long has this been going on?”

“In the way that you’re undoubtedly thinking, not at all,” said Draco, a hint of dryness entering his voice. “But it’s true that she’s been helping me.” 

“So she’s been a traitor.” Her voice began to rise. 

“You don’t yet understand.”

“If you’re pretending that you don’t remember anything, Malfoy, you might as well leave off now. You’re not being convincing.” An awful thought struck her. “Are you the one who told Harry you were an investor? You were! I can always tell when you’ve done something really rotten.”

“How?” he asked. “Explain it to me, Weasley. Tell me how and why you know me so well.”

She slapped her palms down on the table. “Oh, gods, I wish that Harry were still here! I wish he’d stayed to play Henry.” 

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Draco. 

“I don’t mean that he should’ve stayed because he’s a great actor, as you very well know, Malfoy. He would have been terrible in the part. But it would have meant that I wouldn’t have to play Anne Boleyn opposite you!”

“So you didn’t want me here.” 

“What a genius you are, Malfoy,” she said acidly. 

His arms went down on either side of her, trapping her against the table. “What did I do to you, Ginny?”

 _You destroyed me,_ she thought. She would not say it, or anything like it. 

“Nothing,” she said savagely. “If you want to play it like that. We meant nothing to each other. Harry was my first and only love. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Was he?” asked Draco. The question sounded angry, but there was something in it that knocked a bit of the wind out of her sails. He sounded as if he genuinely didn’t know. For the first time, a crazy thought came to her. Draco might not be playing a game, might not be pretending that he didn’t remember what was between them. The lack of memory just might be real. 

“No, he wasn’t, and you know it,” said Ginny. _You were my first love, Draco._ No, she wasn’t about to say that either. “You were my first… er… partner, Malfoy. I think you know what I mean.” That seemed safe enough. What had been between them might have been no more than bodies, from that statement. 

The look of shock on his face was genuine. Even she couldn’t believe that it wasn’t. She leaned forward in her chair, studying his face intently now, tracking every tiny movement of mouth and eye and forehead that might signal whether he was telling truth or feeding her a string of lies. 

“You asked me why I brought you here,” said Draco. “I’ll tell you now. It was because I remembered this cottage, and not only because it’s part of this estate. I remembered one image of you here, just one. You were lying in that bed.” He jerked his head behind them while still keeping his eyes on her. 

Ginny rubbed her aching forehead. Her anger was beginning to turn into something else, and whatever this emotion or realization was, it frightened her. “What happened?” she whispered. 

“I don’t know.” Draco drummed his fingers on the table. “Ginny. May I call you that? Did I call you by your first name?”

She nodded. 

“Ginny, then. We’ve got to read one of Henry’s letters to Anne,” said Draco. “We’re going to use those in our performance, right?”

“Yes, but—how can you think of a thing like that now?”

“I don’t know. But it’s got to happen.” He hesitated. “Do this for me, Ginny. This one thing.”

Under the intense gaze of his silvery eyes, she couldn’t refuse him. 

She picked up the smartcomm and tapped her way to the correct page, aware that the equipment was working again, pushing aside the thought of trying to find a way out by using it. She didn’t want that anymore, not now. She held it out to him. “This was letter number--”

“Don’t tell me.” He shook his head. “I don’t want that. I’ve got to find out if I know without being told, or even reminded.”

“All right. I’ll start.” Ginny began to read aloud from the screen. 

“I am sure that I have since never done any thing to offend you,  
and it seems a very poor return for the great love which I bear you to keep me at a distance both from the speech and the person of the woman that I esteem most in the world. And if you love me with as much affection as I hope you do, I am sure that the distance of our two persons would be a little irksome to you, though this does not belong so much to the mistress as to the servant.

Consider well, my mistress, that absence from you grieves me sorely…” She had to blink to keep back a sudden mist of tears, and tried to cough in order to hide it. 

Draco’s voice picked up the thread.

 

“Hoping that it is not your will that it should be so. But if I knew for certain that you voluntarily desired it, I could do no other than mourn my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly. And so, for lack of time, I make an end of this rude letter.

Written with the hand of him which desireth as much to be yours  
as you do to have him.”

She dropped the folder to the table and stared at Draco. He had read every word correctly. 

“Why do I know the text of this letter?” he asked, his eyes on hers. “Why do I remember every word? Why do I almost remember you, but not quite? And why do I feel that I shouldn’t know these things; that it’s forbidden?”

“We were… we were together. For six months, Draco.” She didn’t even realize that she’d called him by his first name, too. “We used to meet at different places on your family’s properties, the Manor, the estate in Cornwall, the flat in Kensington, and here, here in this cottage.”

“When was the last time you saw me?”

“About a year ago. The day of your last meeting with the Wizengamot.”

Draco gnawed on his lower lip, looking more uncertain than she’d ever seen him. “How long were we… together?”

“You really don’t remember,” she whispered. 

“Ginny, what _happened?_ Pretend I’m mad, pretend anything you like. Just tell me everything from the very beginning.”

She wondered if the smartcomm might help her with the project of escaping from the cottage after all. No. It was much too late for that. 

“It depends on what you mean. The very beginning was about six months after I graduated Hogwarts. About two and half years ago now.”

“You were with Potter, weren’t you?”

“So you do remember after all?” she asked. 

He shook his head. “Not in that way; I only remember that you’d supposedly taken up with Potter again. I saw you with him, I think, but that part’s very vague.”

She nodded. “So how did we begin?” asked Draco, breaking into her thoughts. 

“Uh… I had a horrible fight with Harry,” said Ginny, trying to decide how much she could get away with editing the real story. She and Harry had fought over so many things that day, chiefly the fact that she wouldn’t let him shag her or even come close to it. But even then, she knew that they were really fighting over so much more. 

“I… um, I went to a bar afterwards. It was the Will O’the Wisp, actually,” she went on. 

She’d sat on a barstool, downing drinks, her unsatisfied body screaming at her the entire time much louder than she’d managed to scream at Harry. 

“And then I saw you there,” she said. “And then we—Draco, you’ve got to know what happened then.” 

She had found Draco that night in the bar, and she had gotten drunk, and she had unleashed her pent-up lust and frustration on him. He had been her first, and she wasn’t sure which one of them had been more astonished about that. He had never expected her to be a virgin after all those months with Harry; she had never thought she’d so easily give to Draco Malfoy what she had so firmly withheld from the boy she had always believed she loved. She had pretended, afterwards, that it had only been lust on her part. Even during the months that followed, she was sure that for him, it could be nothing more. They could not keep apart from each other—until the day when they could. 

“And then you ran away,” said Draco. 

A denial should have sprung to her lips, but it didn’t. The first part of their relationship had ended, and then she hadn’t found Draco again until six months later. But she hadn’t really looked for him, which was a fact she had never wanted to admit. He’d sent one owl that she turned away, and she later told herself that if he’d really wanted to find her, he would have been more persistent. 

Theirs had been a mutual failure after their first time, and perhaps they’d never really recovered from it. They had reunited on a snowy day in December, a year and a half ago now, and they had been together, truly together after that. But the separation had set a tone for the relationship that they were never able to change, as if each might disappear at any moment. Ginny now understood that this had been at least as true of herself as it had ever been of Draco. Probably more so. 

Draco clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, giving a long sigh. “My father died three months ago,” he finally said.

“Oh,” she said numbly. “Oh, I didn’t know.”

“Almost nobody does. I don’t want the fact to be made public yet.”

“Is your mother still in France?” she ventured. 

“Yes.” His voice was very clipped. 

Narcissa Malfoy had gone to France to stay with her cousins just after she and Draco had started their relationship for the second time. Draco’s mother loved him; Ginny never had any doubt about that, but she could not endure living in the country where her husband’s love for her had been destroyed, and where her family had failed instead of standing firm against adversity. And now Lucius Malfoy was gone too. Whatever Draco had really thought of his father, however he had really felt, Ginny knew that they were tied by a bond of blood that couldn’t be broken. She couldn’t imagine the impact that the death of his father had on Draco now. She ached with pity for him, even through her confusion, through the spark of anger that still flickered against him.

“I really am sorry,” she said. 

“I don’t need you to be sorry,” said Draco. “I need you to listen. It’s taken me a great deal of time to even begin to unravel all the spells he’d placed. On the Manor, on the Kent house, on various enemies, and on me.”

 _I knew it,_ thought Ginny. _All along, I knew this, somehow. But I would never admit it to myself._

“I was put under a Confounding spell, Ginny, but only in relation to you. I never quite remembered you. I almost would, and then something else would seem quite pressing, and I’d forget. But I tried. I did try.”

“I suppose that’s why I saw Astoria sticking her tongue down your throat a month and a half later.”

Draco shook his head. “It wasn’t what you thought. It was—I don’t know. It was a last moment with her. I didn’t love her. I never loved her. But there was a time when I felt _something_ for her. Do you want to know the truth? What killed that last trace of feeling was kissing her, knowing that you were watching me. I still didn’t know what _we_ had been to each other, but it was the end of my feelings for her in that way. I didn’t touch Astoria beyond what you saw that day. Do you believe me?”

She nodded. 

“But you… You went back to Potter,” Draco said flatly. 

“It’s not that simple. But in a way, yes, I did,” admitted Ginny. 

She could almost hear his next question. _Did you shag him?_ But Draco did not ask. 

“I never stopped trying,” said Draco. “I wanted to talk to you that day when I saw you with George and Luna outside the shop, but then you were with Harry, rather pointedly so. I tried to find you, but I never got very far before my own mind turned on me, and I would forget you again.” He gave her a searching look. “But you didn’t look for me, did you?”

“No!” Ginny covered her face with her hands. “Look, I could have tried a lot harder to find you, and I didn’t. I realize that now. I’m a hideous bitch, all right? I admit it. Are you happy now?”

She hadn’t expected Draco to answer her childish outburst, and at first, she was afraid that he wouldn’t say anything at all. 

“Not yet,” he said, after a short pause. 

She scooted a few inches closer to him. 

“Now?” she asked. 

“A little.” His arm went around her. 

“How about now?” she asked. 

In answer, he kissed her softly. She leaned into the wonderful sensations of that kiss, the precise shape of his mouth, the chocolate smell of his breath, and she knew that she could let it be enough. If she didn’t say anything, there would have a wonderful reunion. Every nerve in her body craved it. But there was still so much left unsaid between them. She shouldn’t let this simply happen. She opened her mouth. 

Draco closed it by intensifying the kiss. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say, she realized. She didn’t want to say it. 

He pushed her back gently, and they fell onto the bed together. 

Ginny remembered his hands, his deft, skilled, touch, and she began to cry when she felt that touch again. Draco kissed away her tears. She didn’t allow him to touch and undress her slowly, as he clearly wanted to do, as he had almost always done. She grabbed his hands with her own and all but tore her own clothing off. 

She didn’t allow him to arouse her carefully and slowly, to make her ready for him until she begged him for what he could give her, as he had so often done. He tried to stroke her breasts, to run his hands along every inch of her skin, but she didn’t allow any of the delicious teasing that she had always loved before. She pulled off his trousers and shirt and pants with her own, less skilled, hands, and she guided him on top of her and over her and into her, with a speed and desperation that she had never showed before, not even on their first frantic night together. After a few token protests, Draco didn’t seem to mind. He took over from her momentum, seizing her hard, thrusting into her relentlessly. His first invasion was almost painful in the most exquisite way possible. It had been so long, and for an instant he felt too large for her, too overwhelming. He forced himself to stop, holding his body above hers, his knuckles clutching onto the sheets and white with strain. 

“Go on, please, Draco, please don’t stop!” she had whispered, and he started taking her hard and fast again. Her orgasm, when it came, was overpowering, overwhelming, and she heard his savage groan and felt the hot endless rush of his own pleasure. 

When she had come to herself again, at least a bit, she saw blood on her fingertips where she had dug her nails into his back. He shook his head impatiently at her guilty look. 

“Scratch me to shreds if you want, Ginny,” he had growled in a feral voice. “Mark me as yours.”

And even though she knew that the words didn’t mean anything, that they’d been said in the heat of passion and no more, she felt a secret thrill. “I’m not done having you,” he said thickly. “Far from done. Can you take more of me?”

“As much as you can give—oh!” He was hardening again inside her, Ginny realized incredulously. Harder than before, actually. 

He picked her up and turned her over as easily as if she were a rag doll, pushed her onto her knees, knocked the breath out of her, and shoved the last few inches of his erection all the way into her, driving her to a perfect explosion of pleasure, following her only a moment later. He fit so tightly inside her in this position that his pleasure triggered more of her own, and she moaned helplessly, convulsing in endless exquisite ripples around him. He bit her shoulder, hard, and the twinge of pain sharpened the pleasure to an almost unbearable pitch. 

“I can’t last,” said Draco. “Not now. Doesn’t matter, though. Again, Ginny, _again._ ”

He flipped her back over, sat up, and pulled her towards him, the muscles in his forearms tensing, pushing her legs apart as he moved her, slowly, deliciously slowly. Together, they watched his length disappear all the way inside her, the sight intensifying the sensation. When she had swallowed all but a few inches of him, he reached down and stroked the pink swollen ridges of her sex, and she whimpered as the pleasure instantly curled and pounded and rushed inside her. This time, she could watch his face as he came, and she saw something more in it than just lust. Surely she did. 

+++

Ginny sat up and blinked. There was a rapping at the front door; it had resounded through her dream, and it was still going on when she woke up. She had no idea how long she’d slept after their passionate lovemaking; no more than a couple of hours, she thought. Draco was breathing evenly and his eyes were closed. She slipped out of bed, leaving him to sleep. 

She opened the door just a crack. Harry’s brilliant green eyes stared back at her, and her heart sank. She slipped out the door and closed it as quietly and quickly as she could, and the bed wasn’t in the direct sightline of the door, but then there was her rat’s nest of hair, the rumpled clothes she’d half pulled back on, and the guilt that must be written all over her face. _Oh, so what!_

“Come away with me, Ginny,” he said without preamble. 

She crossed her arms and stood with her back to the door. “What?”

“I was wrong. I admit it. Look, I understand why Malfoy has to be an investor, all right? If I had the money to give to George, I would, but I just don’t.”

“I understand,” she said hurriedly. She’d distinctly heard some kind of noise coming from behind the door. 

“It’s worse than that. I failed you. I didn’t have any right to pull out of the Henry role.” He looked genuinely miserable. 

 

“It’s not important. It really isn’t. Look, Harry—“

He suddenly took her hands in his. “I’m not going to fail you again. You don’t need Malfoy to play the king; I’ll do it. I had no right to tell you I wouldn’t.”

His hands were warm and firm and strong, and he was talented with them, too, she thought. Nothing like Draco. But then, she couldn’t imagine anyone else being like Draco. 

“Ginny, come with me,” he repeated. “Give me another chance. With this. With everything. Let me show you how happy I can make you, happier than Malfoy ever could.”

If she thought of it in terms of simple, uncomplicated contentment, thought Ginny, he might even be right. Everything would be easy and even with Harry, no storms of emotion, no soaring heights, no miserable depths. It was true that she’d never really given him a chance. 

But he would not be able to make her happy. Happiness was hard-won, complex, and anything but simple. Harry deserved one of two types of women. One wanted no more than he could give, no more than he was capable of giving. Ginny knew that she couldn’t be selfish enough to pretend she could or should be that woman. The other was Hermione. Ginny had always known it, and she prayed that Harry would be willing to face the fact at last. 

“No.” She let his hands go gently. “I wasn’t fair to you any of the times we were together, Harry; I know that now. I’m not always fair. It’s one of my flaws. But I don’t love you. I never did. And you never loved me—you know it’s true. If we picked things up again, if we tried to make our relationship work, it would be the most unfair thing I’ve ever done.”

“But—“

“Harry.” She looked deeply into his eyes, those bright green eyes that she had once loved to see light up when he saw her. “Go and find Hermione. She went back to her flat in London. Go to her, and let her make you happy, in ways I never could.” 

It was only after Harry went away that Ginny felt the warmer air at her back. The door had been open a crack the entire time.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here it is-- the last chapter, yay! :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is Fic #2 in my ginormous project of posting at least the completed D/G fics here. (How many are left? Um... a lot.) Reylo coming soon! :) At the end, you'll find the info related to the original prompt, and also endnotes and author's notes.

CHAPTER FOUR

She went in and got a towel from a small linen closet, carefully drying her wet hair, aware of Draco’s eyes boring into her the entire time. Finally, she looked up. 

“How much did you hear?” she asked. 

“Everything,” he said. He was propped against a wall, his arms crossed. Almost the same exact position Harry had taken, she thought. But oh, how different the two men looked. 

“Then you know that I told him to go away,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that.”

“Because I know damn well why he could find this cottage in the first place,” said Draco. 

Ginny leaned against a stack of towel, her knees going weak. She hadn’t even thought of that herself. 

“This is Malfoy land, and every inch is protected by spells. There’s only one reason why Potter could have found you in spite of it all. There’s only one type of magic which overrides all others.” His hot breath was on the back of her neck now. She whirled on him. 

“All right!” she yelled. “I did shag Harry when we got back together. That’s why he could find me today. That’s what you wanted to know, right? Or maybe you didn’t want to know, but it’s too late now. Last year, I did what I didn’t do before. I slept with him for months. I didn’t say anything about it to you because I was afraid, but I hate being afraid, and I won’t keep it up for another second.”

“Is that the reason why you never tried to find me?” demanded Draco. “Because it would explain a great deal, if so.”

“No! It’s because I was afraid then, too. Afraid that I could never fit in with your role, your position, your mother, your world. I’m a blood traitor in the eyes of some of them. There are people who’d rate me below Muggleborns, simply because at least they didn’t choose what they are, and I did.”

He leaned back against the closet door, his face losing some of its tense look. “My father told you that you weren’t good for me, didn’t he.” It was a statement, not a question. 

“Of course he did. I wouldn’t have left otherwise. I wasn’t about to sink to being that afraid.”

“Ah.” His voice grew quiet. “He told me just a bit about that conversation before he died. Not much, but enough to piece together some of it. And I know now why my father chose to do what he did. That doesn’t begin to excuse his actions, but I understand.”

Ginny moved to stand right next to him, and then, taking a deep breath, she slipped her hand in his. “Let me guess. Because you were my first, we had a bond that he couldn’t simply break. That’s why he had to make you forget me. But if I’d slept with other men before you, then our bond wouldn’t be as strong.”

“I believe that was what my father thought. But he would have been wrong.”

A thrill went through her chest. She sternly tamped it down. She still didn’t really know anything about how he felt. Any emotions he was feeling at that moment might be no more than the triumph of finally figuring out what had really happened during the past year, and she was sure that he had certainly enjoyed shagging her. It might be no more than that. 

“So you don’t care at all that I finally slept with Harry?” she asked, deliberately baiting him—or at least she hoped so. 

Draco grimaced. “I’d rather you worked your way through the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team than spending even one night with Harry Potter. But you said that you didn’t love him. Is that true?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “That’s why it was so unfair to him.”

“Forgive me if I don’t agonize over your lack of justice towards Potter. I imagine he’ll survive.” Draco looked down at her, his eyes strangely unguarded. “What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter to me if you’ve had other lovers, as long as you didn’t love them. It should, but it doesn’t, and it never would have done. The morning after we’d first made love, that’s what I thought. How glad I was that I’d been your first, but then, too… that even if I weren’t, I would still…” He seemed unable to finish the sentence. 

“So you do remember that,” she said in a low voice. 

His hand moved over hers and held her fingers firmly. She closed her eyes to keep the tears from falling. 

“That’s really what the problem was, Draco? That you thought I loved Harry? Tell me the truth.”

He nodded stiffly. 

“I thought I did too, once,” she said. “I know better now, but there’s something of me that will always feel the pain that I didn’t, and that he didn’t love me back even though what I felt wasn’t really love at all. Hermione is so much better for him. But still, it’s like the space when a tooth is drawn. It still aches. Always will. And you felt something for Astoria once, didn’t you?”

Draco nodded. “Yes. Understand, Ginny, that I invested her with qualities she didn’t have, but Astoria’s far from a bad woman. It wasn’t her fault if I demanded more from her than she was capable of giving.”

“But?” prompted Ginny when he didn’t go on. 

“I believe that you and I are in similar situations there. I suppose that some very small part of me will always regret. But you’ve got to understand something, Ginny. That bit of me which remembers Astoria is here. In my mind, no more.” He drew her hand up to place it on his right temple. For the first time, he looked down at her wrist. He reached out and touched the bracelet he had given her. 

“You’re still wearing this,” he said. 

“Always,” said Ginny. “Look, Draco, I… I think I understand now why your father put those spells on you to try to keep me away. It wasn’t just because you were my first. It was because I…” She swallowed, and then decided to go out on the fragile limb, one that might break under her as she put weight on it. She had lain in his arms, he had given her expert, exquisite pleasure, as always, he knew that she had turned Harry away, but she still didn’t know what was really in his heart. “It’s because I was the first girl you ever… cared for.”

“No. It’s not a matter of caring.”

Ginny began to shove herself away from him. “I’m going out in the rain right now.”

“No, you’re not.” Draco took her hand down and placed it on the right side of his chest, where she felt his heart beat. “It’s because you’re here. Understand, I never wanted you to take up residence, but you have. Always. And you always will. I couldn’t get rid of you if I wanted to, and believe me, when I was going mad with scraps of memories, I believe that I did want to. After you left me, I felt that the strings in my heart had been pulled out without even knowing why or how.” He traced her hand along his chest, as if guiding her fingers along the invisible string. “It’s a horribly over-the-top image, isn’t it? But I felt it, Ginny. Something torn away, here. You had it, but you were so very far away, and I couldn’t grasp you. Couldn’t hold you. I’ve got to have you here. Do you understand? You can’t go away, ever again.”

She laid her head on his chest, and they both found that this couldn’t be done comfortably while standing up, so they somehow ended up lying on the beautiful sumptuous bed again. But this time, they lay quietly together. She curled up in his arms, listening to his heart beat, and a great deal of time seemed to pass while the rain beat softly against the windowpanes. 

“So you didn’t try to find me because you were afraid?” asked Draco. “That was very silly of you, Ginny.”

“No. It wasn’t.” She traced her finger on the smooth, pale skin of his inner arm. She really wished that she could avoid saying what she knew she had to say next. But I won’t be a coward again. 

“Because your father was right in one way, and you’ve got to know it. It’s not just that I won’t fit in with your social circles,” she said. “I know what the standards are for families like the Malfoys. It’s all well and good that I was a virgin when you first had me. But someone else has had me in that way too, and nobody in your circle will think that the first makes up for the second. The fact that my only other… partner… was Harry Potter would just make matters worse. If anyone else knew, then there would be whispers. Criticisms. Things said behind your back.”

“But you did mean what you said when you told me that you didn’t love him,” said Draco, his voice tight. 

“Of course I meant it. But that wouldn’t matter to the people in your world. They would still say that I’m all wrong for you because of it, if for no other reason.” She looked at him squarely. “Understand, I’m not apologizing, Draco. I didn’t do anything wrong. Well, except to Harry, and that’s nothing to do with me and you. And it’s not right, it’s not fair, nobody expects you to have never touched anyone else before or after me, but it’s still true. You know it.”

“I do know it.” Draco paused, and then spoke very deliberately. “To hell with everyone else, with what anybody thinks, and with society in general. I won’t live with my heartstrings pulled out of me, Ginny.” 

+++

Draco and Ginny stood in front of the cottage the next morning, simply looking at each other. 

“Let’s see if we can leave now,” she said. 

“I believe that we can,” said Draco. “Luna told me that she’d set the spell for only one night.”

“ _Luna,_ huh?” Ginny raised her eyebrows at him. 

“We’re third cousins, you know,” said Draco. “And she’s become my friend. I wish that I could have accepted her friendship back at school, but then, there were so many things that I could not have accepted in those days.”

“I know,” said Ginny, feeling oddly shy. She pressed a button on her smartcomm. 

They were standing in the center of a medieval-style hall, the room spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof, its walls hung with splendid tapestries. The room was filled with wardrobe-elves rushing around frantically, their arms crammed full of piles of glittering cloth, Colin Creevey running from place to place and looking as if he might jump out the window at any second, and a milling crowd of surly-looking actors in various stages of Tudor undress. 

“The sleeves keep coming off this dress. And—oh! It’s coming to life again!” Pansy was screeching, batting ineffectively at yards of lace and cloth of gold fabric that were flailing in the air. 

“Oh. Sorry, Pans. Wrong spell,” said Millicent Bulstrode, stomping on the sleeves where they trailed on the floor. 

“I don’t want to be Gentleman of the St-st-stool,” Gregory Goyle was saying to Colin in threatening tones, his burly arms crossed. 

“It was a very important job,” Colin replied in distracted tones. “Very influential… you had access to the king day and night…”

“Never mind him!” Theodore Nott stepped between them. “I’ve told you, Creevey—I don’t want to play the Duke of Buckingham.”

“We’ve been over this and over this,” said Colin. “He was the most important man in the kingdom after the king. I don’t see what the problem is—“

“I’m beheaded in the first ten minutes of the show! That’s what the problem is.”

“I’ve seen Kneazles herded far more successfully than this,” Draco muttered to Ginny out of the corner of his mouth. 

“Places, places, please.” Colin was sweating, his hair stuck to his forehead, and he had a frantic look in his eyes. “Ginny, oh Ginny, where is she? Yesterday was a disaster without her. Just a disaster. And where’s Draco Malfoy?” His glance darted everywhere in the room except the threshold of the front door, where the two of them stood.

“We’re going to step into that insanity, you know,” Ginny said to Draco. 

“I know. But there’s just one thing before we do.” 

“Draco, we really do have to get in there. Colin is about to have apoplexy.”

“I know. But do listen. It’s from Henry’s first letter to Anne.” He kissed her on the forehead. “’In turning over in my mind the contents of your last letters, I have put myself into great agony, not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage, as you show in some places, or to my advantage, as I understand them in some others, beseeching you earnestly to let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two.’”

“The love?” Ginny asked softly. “Really?”

“Really. ‘It is absolutely necessary for me to obtain this answer, having been for above a whole year stricken with the dart of love, and not yet sure whether I shall fail of finding a place in your heart and afFeftion.”

Ginny had to swallow hard. “You have found it, Draco.”

He leaned down to her, and at the feeling of his lips on the tender skin of her ear, she suddenly wanted to turn around and run all the way back to the cottage with Draco, as fast as her feet could take her. 

“I love you more than Henry ever could have loved Anne,” he whispered. 

“You’d better not try to do to me what he did to her,” she said, her eyes snapping. 

“Shh. I’d never cut your head off, Ginny. You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” whispered Ginny. 

It was the most romantic thing she had ever heard. 

~~~the end!!!~~~

 

Briefly describe what you'd like to receive in your fic: Ginny breaks up with Draco after a misunderstanding (I’m envisioning – don’t let this suggestion deter your own creativity – her seeing him with another woman and thinking that he’s cheating on her – but obviously not). After being apart (for however long you like) Draco decides that he’s going to win her back, despite all of her male relatives hating him for breaking her heart. I’d like to see a rebirth of their relationship.  
The tone/mood of the fic: As realistic as possible. Just enough angst, fluff, etc. to feel like this could actually happen.  
An element/line of dialogue/object you would specifically like in your fic: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time.” – Thomas A. Edison  
OR  
A reference to the Tudors – this could be as simple as referring to someone being a man-whore, like Henry VIII, or visiting one of the Tudor palaces.  
Preferred rating of the fic you want: PG-13 (T) or higher  
Canon or AU? Canon, minus Epilogue  
Deal Breakers (anything you don't want?): Hermione as a major character (she can be present, but cannot play a significant role); pure fluff; time travel (although the consideration of it by a character is alright); and unrealistic characters (i.e. super sappy Draco).  
Art prompt: N/A

 

NOTES

(0) There’s always been a historical rumor that Queen Elizabeth I secretly had a child (Arthur) during the first few years of her reign, and that Robert Dudley was the father. Nobody knows if this is true, but it’s far from impossible. Because they didn’t have DNA testing in the sixteenth century, we will almost certainly never know for sure.   
(1) 

 

(2) Such as Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Bishop Fisher. Just a recap of what ultimately happened to all of the wives—Katherine of Aragon died, Anne Boleyn was beheaded, Jane Seymour died a few days after giving birth to Edward VI, Anne of Cleves was divorced very quickly, Catherine Howard (Anne’s cousin) was also beheaded, and Catherine Parr outlived Henry. (Names kind of got repeated, didn’t they? ;)  
(3) 

 

(4) Anne’s brother. We won’t get into the details of what happened to him.   
(5) 

 

(6) Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, and uncle, Thomas Howard.   
(7) 

 

(8) True. It was an age with a very low level of personal affect in families and between couples. The gentry and nobility married in order to improve wealth and family connections; they saved their passionate feelings for religion.   
(9) 

 

(10) This is an idea I’ve come up with from my research (hey, did I mention that I wrote THREE, count em, THREE books set during the Tudor era? What happened to them? Um…) Henry VIII wanted to fall in love with the women he married, which was very uncommon at that time. He had remarkably bad luck with marrying women who claimed to be virgins and weren’t. We can definitely put Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Catherine Howard in that category. Anne of Cleves possibly had sex with her former fiancée in the German states before she got to England, a theory that’s bolstered by a lot of comments that Henry made at the time. While there were some rumors about Jane Seymour, I think she was the most likely candidate for Henry’s only virgin wife, and I also think it’s no coincidence that she was the only one he said had really made him happy. (Catherine (Kate) Parr, wife #6, was a widow, so it wasn’t expected of her. However, she was in love with Thomas Seymour throughout her marriage with Henry. And it may not be a coincidence that Henry almost ordered her to go to the Tower once he found out.)   
(11) 

 

 

After all, look at what happened. Henry was unquestionably in love with the first Katherine for a very long time; it’s meaningful that his really horrible treatment of her only began after he started seriously digging into whether or not her first marriage with his older brother Arthur had been consummated. And he did learn what modern historians conclude—that she’d almost certainly had sex with Arthur before him. Anne B. and Cathy H. were the two wives he beheaded when there just wasn’t any need for him to do so—he could have sent them both into exile or nunneries. Henry demanded an annulment from Anne of Cleves immediately after their first night together, when he specifically claimed that he was “convinced that she was no maid.” It made very little sense, because England desperately needed that alliance with the German states. (And this Anne, who was a very smart woman, gave him what he wanted with no hesitation.) 

 

I do think that what was really going on here was that Henry’s need for exclusive love was destroyed by his finding out that his wives had loved other men besides him, as we can pretty much prove now through historical evidence. But this could only be understood at the time through the fact that they weren’t virgins, which was definitely what they were supposed to be.

 

I’ve always had a certain viewpoint on sexual mores in the wizarding world. We see almost everybody getting married very young and generally marrying whoever their earliest sweetheart is. (We don’t see that too often today.) We never hear of or see anyone in any of the books who is/was divorced. And remember those bannisters in the girls’ dormitories??

 

I do think that it all goes with an extremely conservative viewpoint towards sexual activity (far more so than the sixteenth century British, in fact, where female virginity at marriage was only demanded or expected of the upper classes.) I also see it as having power, magical power, in the wizarding world, as it in fact did and does in a lot of societies. So that’s why I feel that Lucius actually would have been happier if Ginny had been a slut before she started up with Draco; it would have neutralized the power of their connection. 

 

I think that Draco could have gone the same way in his attitudes, and it’s a huge step for him to admit to Ginny that he would have loved her no matter what she’d done with other boys and men-- particularly because Harry was her only other partner.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N:   
> Originally written for the D/G FFN group Christmas exchange of... 2016 I think??
> 
> Draco and Ginny speak the actual text of Henry VIII’s letters to Anne Boleyn, which were preserved. Her replies were not, so we don’t have any real idea of what she actually wrote back to him.  
> In the rules which I have made up in my own mind—um, I mean, received as a mystical message from beyond—the Malfoys have a few other houses scattered around the British Isles. One is in Kent, on the grounds of Hever Castle, and obviously exists in another dimension from the one that has the golf course. ;)   
> Hever Castle was Anne Boleyn’s family home. And yes, the Astor wing is now a hotel!! Just GUESS how expensive it is.


End file.
